Book Image

Mastering Predictive Analytics with R - Second Edition

By : James D. Miller, Rui Miguel Forte
Book Image

Mastering Predictive Analytics with R - Second Edition

By: James D. Miller, Rui Miguel Forte

Overview of this book

R offers a free and open source environment that is perfect for both learning and deploying predictive modeling solutions. With its constantly growing community and plethora of packages, R offers the functionality to deal with a truly vast array of problems. The book begins with a dedicated chapter on the language of models and the predictive modeling process. You will understand the learning curve and the process of tidying data. Each subsequent chapter tackles a particular type of model, such as neural networks, and focuses on the three important questions of how the model works, how to use R to train it, and how to measure and assess its performance using real-world datasets. How do you train models that can handle really large datasets? This book will also show you just that. Finally, you will tackle the really important topic of deep learning by implementing applications on word embedding and recurrent neural networks. By the end of this book, you will have explored and tested the most popular modeling techniques in use on real- world datasets and mastered a diverse range of techniques in predictive analytics using R.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering Predictive Analytics with R Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
8
Dimensionality Reduction
Index

Alternatives


Since R is an in-memory language, it sometimes has a reputation of not being able to handle big data. However, using some creativity and strategic thinking, you can use big data in your predictive analytics projects quite successfully.

In addition to the preceding approaches, there are currently a number of alternative approaches you may wish to research, such as:

Chunking

There are packages available that avoid storing data in memory. Instead, objects are stored on hard disk and analyzed in chunks. As a side effect, the chunking also leads naturally to parallelization, if the algorithms allow parallel analysis of the chunks in principle. You can search: Revolution R Enterprise for some background on the topic.

Alternative language integrations

Integrating higher performing programming languages is becoming a popular alternative to dealing with big data sources in R. This concept takes portions of R code and moves them to another language that may be better suited to carry out the...